One more thing I’m thankful for

This holiday weekend, as I prepared Thanksgiving dinner, dodging children underfoot, I thought about what I might say when we had the inevitable “tell everyone something you’re thankful for” moment around the dinner table. My ideas ranged from the brutally honest “that I don’t have to touch raw turkey skin for another year,” to the [...]

UP CLOSE: Remarriage/Stepparenting– Call for Submissions

Ready or not the Christmas season is upon us. Holidays are all about families, and few things complicate family relationships like remarriage and step parenting.
I didn’t think remarriage had much to do with me– I hope to be married to my love until we both die at 95 holding hands. But both my brothers are [...]

Trying to become a woman who knows

I don’t take kindly to housework. There are aspects of it, such as dusting and scrubbing toilets (do not get me started on ironing), that I feel are beneath me. I find it frustrating to spend time and energy on chores that so quickly and easily become undone.
Simply put, there are other things I’d [...]

Guess Who’s Paying for Dinner?

Thanks to a fancy new job and, more to the point, a fancy new salary, for the first time in my adult life I am not worried about money.
This means I can buy plane tickets to see my friends get married, and I can give people presents just because, and I can pay off my [...]

Praise to the Lord from Whom All Blessings Flow

Life isn’t fair.
It isn’t fair that God created this full, beautiful earth and sent us here to love, laugh, learn, work play; to ache, mourn, fail, to go astray.
And it isn’t fair that God sent His Only Begotten to be whipped and scorned and crucified for our sins.
Thanks be to God for his unspeakable gift. [...]

A new crown, no prospects of royalty and today’s a new day

Yesterday I sat in the dentist chair with the drill humming in the background and I made a resolve NEVER to eat sugar again. I promised myself that I’ll floss everyday. I swear I’ll be more vigilant with my kids’ teeth so that they don’t have to endure agony in the chair. I carried home [...]

Home for the Holidays: The Good Times Abound

I have a *friend* who, although she loves her family dearly, finds her stomach tightening and her left eye twitching when holidays and family gatherings approach. Perhaps it’s the added pressure of having to dust all those high shelves and wipe those fingerprints off of the walls (and cabinets and doors and chairs and floors). [...]

The Marriage Bed

This morning one of the children woke up too early. He started bouncing a rubber ball against the wall of his room. The steady rhythm woke us up. My husband’s long, dark arm went under the blankets and found me and pulled me to him. We lay there in the morning [...]

Peculiar Treasure

A few weeks ago, one of our spunkier staff members related some feedback from a Segullah-reading friend. Lately, she said, this friend has found the blog less open and welcoming than usual, more “hard-line” in terms of orthodoxy.
“I got a similar comment from a reader friend recently,” added progressive-minded staff member B.
“Interesting,” said the [...]

When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Grateful

Perhaps you’ve noticed Sue Anderson’s wise and insightful comments here on Segullah. She is a gifted poet and author who devotes her real passion to her children and grandchildren. You can catch up with her at Sue’s News, Views ‘n Muse.
I’ve spent 2009 feeling uncharacteristically sorry for myself and can’t quite put my finger on [...]

What a Difference 30 Years Makes

First time blogger Heather Bennion Judd shares her recent “tough day” cathartic writing at the coaxing of a friend. Not the B.A. in English from BYU, but rather the small stack of short stories, poetry and essays that she’s written since the 4th grade should have been a clue that this day of virtual “publication” [...]

Segullah Suggests: Books to Buy This Christmas

I‘m a traditional kind of girl—you know, one who puts off her Christmas shopping until the day after Thanksgiving and then spends December in a frenzy of list-making, bargain-shopping and gift-wrapping. Although I wish I could be one of those women who creates dozens of heartfelt handmade gifts, alas, craftiness is not my thing. [...]

Lessons from “Cool Runnings”

You know the story. Some runners from Jamaica decide to enter as a bobsled team for the Olympics. Their coach is John Candy, himself a disgraced Olympian, and through a series of mishaps, slapstick adventures, and silly antics, they find themselves with a broken bobsled at the end of race. [...]

Stars Bright

After several hours of driving, I stepped out of the car and felt the breath rush out of me. In my thirty years I could not remember seeing the night sky appear as it did then. It was literally stunning. I felt like I’d been lifted into space, like I could touch the stars or [...]

Finding the Ease

I stand in warrior one, basic yoga, my back foot flattened, my arms lifted, fingers splayed.
“Engage the hands,” my teacher says. “Deepen the bend in your front knee. See how far down you can come.”
I engage my hands, deepen the bend. “Now hold,” she says. “We’re going to be here for a while.”
So I hold, [...]

Segullah Gift Cards!

Artist Leslie Graff has graciously donated the use of some of her artwork for our first in an artists series of cards available through Segullah. The link is over on the right side-bar here at the blog, or click here. They are sold in sets of 8, and are available now.
Thank you Leslie!

Ebbing Tide: Reflections on Entering Menopause

My eleven-year-old daughter, my youngest child, is losing her little girl look. In the last six months she’s sprouted out of her jeans and shirts, her legs suddenly long, her angles and straight lines softening into curves. She closes the door when she showers, asks me when she can start shaving her legs, and wears [...]

Male’ yad

My Testimony for Today
As I walked into church last week, I shook hands with the people I passed by, I embraced the sisters I saw, I patted the children underfoot. My hands touched and moved across the members of our ward as we mingled with each other before the services started.

Quitting

I’m a quitter at heart.
That might surprise you, coming from a woman who’s run 19 marathons and birthed six children. But in every race there was a moment when I wanted to jump in the sag wagon and during every pregnancy there was a time when I wanted to jump out a window.
And now, when [...]

Failure Academy

“Try again. Fail again. Fail Better.” Samuel Beckett
In the early summer of 1991 we thought we had the world by the tail. My husband had just finished his first year of law school and had been accepted to study international law for the summer in London. Hooray! I’m no fool; I quit my job to [...]

Legacy

Grandpa hides a small box of still-shiny medals away in a drawer where no one can find them.
“War is hell,” he said flatly.
He won’t talk about the war. He never saw combat. He said it was terrible, whatever he saw.
It was 1943, the height of World War II. At seventeen, my grandfather Bill and his [...]

Trying to Cure the Seven Year Itch? Scratch It. Often.

Today’s Up Close post comes from Nan, a cheery and clever woman who delights in her expedition. In her words: “I spent the first 18 years of my life in the same house and ward in Northern Utah. In the decade and a half since, I’ve had 30 different addresses in places as remote as [...]

If I should die (and you should live)…

5:30 a.m., the alarm rings. I slap my hair into messy pigtails, throw on a neon-yellow technical shirt, leggings, and my running shoes, and strap on an anklet. I’m not much of an accessorizer, especially before sunrise, but I don’t wear the anklet because it’s cute; it’s a Road ID, so if I collapse on [...]

Filling My Senses

It’s getting warmer here in Australia, Spring slowly rolling into Summer. The rosellas are flirty, all coy glances and side shimmies towards each other, working out who they’re going to fly away with. More skin is being bared in town as bikinis and boardies reappear after winter’s chill. Sand sugars calves, bellies and shoulders, enticing me [...]

Book of Miracles

I worried about Stefan almost constantly.
The spring he turned 14 was a lonely one. His friends from school were busy and distant; the Teachers in his quorum were polite but not inclusive. The happy-go-lucky kid I’d known began to anger easily and his jokes gained a bitter edge.
A wise friend told me to pray that [...]

Just Doing my Best

Angie and I both stood in the church hallway, bouncing our fussy babies on our hips. Our conversation turned to temple attendance. I sighed, “I’ve been going once a month to do sealings. I should probably go more often, but I’m doing the best that I can.” Angie stopped bouncing and looked at [...]

Statue of Limitations

When I was a freshman at BYU, and straight out of being raised “in the mission field” of vast California, I was leaving a religion class and chanced upon this scene:
There was a boy, in the JSB, off a corridor in a small little courtyard area that contained a statue of Joseph Smith. From a [...]

Transformation Narratives: Your Life As Story

One there was a…
And one day …
And because of this…
And she realized…
And she decided…
And ever since then…
A few months ago at a professional conference (for Child Llife Specialists) one session was about therapeutic uses of transformation narratives. Pairing “journey” stories with children to help mirror the life-changing events related to medical conditions, hospitalization, and loss.
While the [...]

Ladies, start your engines

November’s UP CLOSE topic is sexuality. This post is about understanding female sexuality. If you’re not comfortable with the topic, please don’t read the post.
A couple of weeks ago I was concerned about some psychological symptoms I’d been experiencing, so I sat down for a chat with my psychiatrist. “How are you feeling these [...]